(ROCKPORT, Mass.) — Two people who went diving off a beach in Rockport, Massachusetts, were found dead Wednesday within hours of each other, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
At approximately 11 a.m., the Rockport Police Department discovered a man who had been diving in the area dead on Front Beach.
Rockport police soon realized that two people were diving in that area that morning, and a search for a second diver began, the Coast Guard said.
Authorities were looking for a 70-year-old man in full diving gear. At about 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, he was found by Massachusetts State Police with the use of sonar technology, according to the Coast Guard.
Multiple agencies were involved in the search for the second diver.
The Essex County District Attorney’s Office is leading the investigation into the deaths.
Rockport is a fishing town on the Atlantic coast located about 40 miles northeast of Boston.
(NEW YORK) — Frank James, who opened fire on a crowded subway car in Brooklyn, New York at rush hour, injuring 10 people, will be sentenced Thursday in Brooklyn federal court.
Prosecutors have asked for life in prison. The sentencing hearing begins at noon and there will be victim impact statements given from the injured passengers.
Following the hearing, the U.S. Attorney and the FBI will make remarks to cameras outside.
(BALTIMORE) — The Baltimore Police Department has released surveillance video of persons of interest sought in connection with Tuesday’s mass shooting at Morgan State University.
Investigators are asking for the public’s help in identifying the individuals seen in the video.
The gunfire that erupted outside on the campus of the historically Black university in Maryland’s most populous city during homecoming week on Tuesday night appears to have been the result of “a dispute between two smaller groups, and one individual was a target of two individuals who had weapons,” according to Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley.
Five people, including four students, were shot. But none of them were the intended target, Worley said.
The victims — four men and one woman, between the ages of 18 and 22 — all suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were treated at area hospitals, according to police.
The shooting does not appear to have been racially motivated, according to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.
Police first responded to the scene to investigate the shooting at approximately 9:25 p.m. ET on Tuesday, as Morgan State University issued a shelter-in-place order on campus. Just before midnight, police announced on social media that the incident was no longer being considered an active shooter situation. About half an hour later, the school lifted the shelter-in-place order.
All classes at Morgan State University are canceled for the rest of the week, while homecoming events are also canceled or postponed until a suspect is identified, according to the school’s president, David Wilson.
No arrests have been made, police said.
Anyone with information on the case is urged to call Baltimore Police Department detectives at 410-396-2444 or, to remain anonymous, the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line at 1-866-7Lockup.
(ANNAPOLIS, Md.) — The Maryland Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Thursday in the ongoing Adnan Syed case that was the subject of the hit podcast “Serial.”
Syed spent 24 years fighting charges that he’d killed his former girlfriend in 1999.
Last year a judge vacated Syed’s conviction for the murder of his high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Young Lee, the brother and legal representative for Hae Min Lee, filed an appeal arguing that his rights were violated because he wasn’t given sufficient notice to a hearing that helped to vacate Syed’s conviction.
A Maryland appeals court in March reinstated Syed’s murder conviction after finding that the lower court violated the victim’s family’s right to attend a hearing on vacating the conviction. An appellate court panel voted 2-1 to reinstate the conviction, according to a court filing, saying “the circuit court violated Mr. Lee’s right to notice of, and his right to attend, the hearing on the State’s motion to vacate.”
Despite his conviction being reinstated, Syed has remained free since September 2022. The Maryland Supreme Court will now determine whether to potentially send Syed back to prison or throw out his conviction. A ruling in the case is not expected until later this year.
Syed, who is now 42, had been serving a life sentence for more than two decades — more than half his life — since his arrest in 1999.
He was just 17 when he was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery, kidnapping and imprisonment of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 2000.
He has maintained his innocence and denied any involvement in Lee’s death.
Judge Michelle Phinn ordered Syed’s release in September 2022, asking for his shackles to be removed after listening to the state and the defense make arguments.
She said that “in the interests of fairness and justice,” Syed should be released on his own recognizance after finding that prosecutors failed to turn over evidence that could have helped his trial in 2000 and after new evidence was discovered that could have affected the outcome of his case.
The prosecution admitted they had failed to turn over evidence for two possible suspects who were not named or charged in the case.
The State’s Attorney for the city of Baltimore’s office moved to vacate his conviction, freeing Syed from prison before Lee’s family’ appeal was decided.
Mr. Syed’s lawyers have argued that Lee’s complaints “became moot” when prosecutors dropped the charges against Syed on Oct. 11, 2022, ending the criminal case against him.
(CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.) — Three people have survived after being on board a FedEx plane that crash landed at Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport Wednesday night, according to the Chattanooga Fire Department.
A call came in at 11:04 p.m. Wednesday regarding reports that a FedEx Boeing 757 plane was experiencing landing gear failure during its final approach to the airport.
After circling several times, the plane made its final descent and then crash landed, skidding off the runway, according to Chattanooga Fire Department.
Smoke came out of the engines, but no fire occurred after the plane landed, authorities said.
The Chattanooga Police Department told ABC News that the three people on board the FedEx plane were uninjured and able to climb out of the plane after it crash landed.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Three Philadelphia police officers were shot Wednesday night while responding to a 911 call about a shooting at a home, officials said.
Just after 7 p.m. ET, officers responded to a 911 call regarding a person shot in a home as part of a domestic dispute, Philadelphia Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford Jr. said at a news conference on Wednesday evening.
The incident started as an argument between a juvenile and his father, and Stanford Jr. said the uncle got involved. Both the youth and uncle retreated to a room, where the father shot the uncle, and the uncle and juvenile then called 911, the commissioner said.
When officers arrived at the home, Stanford Jr. said the father, who was at the front of the house at that point, began to fire on them.
According to officials, he hit two officers in the leg and one sergeant in the finger.
Officers returned fire, striking the suspect, the commissioner said.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene, Stanford Jr. said.
The officers and sergeant were taken to a hospital and remain in stable condition, according to the commissioner. The uncle was also taken to the hospital and is in critical condition.
(ATLANTA) — Three weeks before the scheduled start of his trial in Fulton County, a defendant in the Georgia election interference case is seeking to have the indictment against him dismissed based on an alleged paperwork error made by one of the lead special prosecutors in the case.
Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who drafted legal memos suggesting the use of so-called “alternate electors” to prevent Joe Biden from receiving 270 electoral votes in the 2020 election, is set to go on trial on Oct. 23. But in a filing Wednesday, his attorney alleged that Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was brought in by the district attorney to help investigate the case, didn’t file the oath of office required to join the DA’s team.
The motion alleges that Wade filled out the oath of office paperwork, but did not file it as required by law until just last week — an error that Chesebro says makes Wade’s work “void as a matter of law.”
“Nathan Wade, who has and continues to serve as lead counsel in this case — including during the presentment of the case to the criminal grand jury and at the time the underlying indictment was returned — was not an authorized public officer by Georgia law,” the filing states.
The filing, from Chesebro attorney Scott Grubman, alleges that Wade did not file either of the required oaths “until September 27, 2023, which was soon after [Grubman] sent Mr. Wade an email inquiring about this apparent lapse (and asking for proof of filing).”
In the filing, Chesebro’s attorney urged the judge not to let the alleged paperwork error be “chalked up to mere ‘technical noncompliance'”– warning that it is an error that may rise to a criminal violation.
Former Georgia prosecutor Chris Timmons, however, said that the practice of using special assistant district attorneys is “routine” in the state, and that “at worst” the error would be “embarrassing” for the state — but not a blow to the entire indictment.
“If he was not sworn in, at worst it’s embarrassing for the Fulton County DA’s office but it would not affect the case,” Timmons told ABC News. “The Georgia Supreme Court has held unanimously that the presence at the grand jury of individuals who are not sworn assistant district attorneys will not vitiate an otherwise valid indictment.”
Grubman, however, says in the filing that the Georgia state legislature has made it a misdemeanor crime to “take an actions as a public officer without first taking and filing the appropriate oaths.”
“Because Mr. Wade did not file his oaths as expressly required by law, any actions that he took prior to filing the oath on September 27, 2023, are void as a matter of law,” the filing states. “This includes presenting this case to the criminal grand jury and obtaining an indictment in return.”
“Accordingly, the indictment in this case must be dismissed,” the filing says.
Chesebro and 18 others, including former President Donald Trump, pleaded not guilty in August to all charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia. Defendant Scott Hall subsequently took a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to tampering with voting machine equipment.
Chesebro’s lawyers acknowledge that their client drafted the legal memos at the center of his alleged conduct, but say his actions were justified since Chesebro was “fulfilling his duty to his client as an attorney.”
The Fulton County district attorney’s office declined to comment to ABC News.
Chesebro’s filing comes before another on-camera hearing in the case is scheduled for this week, during which the judge is set to hear a separate motion to dismiss filed by Chesebro’s co-defendant, Sidney Powell.
(NEW YORK) — The leader of a drug delivery service who was convicted earlier this year of distributing the fentanyl-laced cocaine that killed three young New York City professionals on the same day was sentenced on Wednesday to 30 years in prison.
Billy Ortega, 37, was convicted in January of federal charges for providing the drugs that caused the 2021 overdose deaths of Amanda Scher, Ross Mtangi and Julia Ghahramani. He faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The victims’ families appeared in Manhattan federal court as the sentence was handed down.
“My son is gone and my life destroyed because of Ortega’s greed and callousness,” Mtangi’s mother, Lauren Lackey, said in a letter to Judge Ronnie Abrams. “I don’t believe he cares about the destruction he caused or the rippling effects that our families will endure. It could have been prevented. My son was poisoned by fentanyl. That horror sits on my chest and I feel it with every breath.”
Ortega was convicted of one count of narcotics conspiracy resulting in death, three counts of narcotics distribution resulting in death and one count of use and carrying of a firearm in furtherance of the narcotics conspiracy.
Federal prosecutors said he was the leader of a drug trafficking conspiracy, distributing dangerous drugs in the city via a crew of workers for at least seven years. He used friends and family members to run his stash house and delivery operation out of a public housing unit in Manhattan, according to prosecutors.
In March 2021, Ortega mixed fentanyl into a weak batch of cocaine and sold it to at least five customers, who had no idea that they were receiving fentanyl, prosecutors said.
“Ortega knew what he was doing, and bears full responsibility for those deaths. He ‘bagged up’ the deadly batch of drugs himself. He deliberately and personally introduced fentanyl into his cocaine, and then willingly distributed it to his customers,” prosecutors said in asking for a life sentence.
Prosecutors cited what they called the defendant’s callous disregard for human life.
“Worse still, the first customer to use the deadly batch warned Ortega it was poison — that it sent someone to hospital, who had to be revived with emergency anti-opioid medication,” prosecutors said. “Ortega read that first customer’s warning, but went ahead and sold the same poison to four other customers anyway, killing Ghahramani, Scher and Mtangi.”
The defense sought a sentence of no more than 25 years in prison for Ortega — citing, in part, a difficult childhood.
“Billy had a difficult upbringing, his parents were separated and his father was barely in his life,” the defense sentencing memorandum said. “He resided with his mother and grandmother, though his grandmother was his primary caretaker as his mother was in and out of rehab.”
(HOLYOKE, Mass.) — A shooting at a Massachusetts intersection on Wednesday critically injured a pregnant bystander on a bus, whose infant subsequently died, officials said.
The shooting was reported shortly before 1 p.m. in Holyoke, just outside of Springfield, according to Holyoke police.
Three male suspects were involved in an altercation that led to the shooting, according to the Hampden District Attorney’s Office.
“It is believed one of the rounds from that altercation struck a public transportation bus and an uninvolved female occupant, who was seated in the bus,” the office said in a statement.
The victim, who was pregnant, was transported to a local hospital in critical condition, according to the Hampden District Attorney’s Office. Her infant, in need of life-saving medical care, was delivered but died, the office said. Officials did not say how far along in the pregnancy the woman was.
The three suspects were transported to nearby hospitals and are in custody, according to the Hampden District Attorney’s Office.
The Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit assigned to the Hampden District Attorney’s Office and the Holyoke Police Department are investigating the incident.
(NEW YORK) — New York City is seeing signs of the influx of migrant arrivals that communities along the southern border have grappled with in recent weeks. The surge in the city comes amid a record number of asylum-seekers entering the shelter system since Spring 2022.
At a press conference on Wednesday, NYC Deputy Mayor for Health & Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said the city is seeing a “significant surge” of arrivals in recent days.
Officials at the briefing said there have been up to 400 migrants arriving in the city each day in recent months, but that number has shot up to around 600 per day.
Mayor Eric Adams’ chief of staff Camille Joseph attributed the spike, in part, to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ramping up the number of charter buses with migrants he’s sending to NYC and other sanctuary cities.
During the week of Sept. 11, the city received around 10 charter buses. But through the week of Sept. 25, they received 27, Joseph said.
Abbott has been busing migrants to sanctuary cities since April 2022 as a way to protest President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Adams has accused the governor of using “vulnerable asylum-seekers as political pawns.” Texas officials have left most of the communication about when and where buses are being dispatched to local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Joseph said that as Abbott increases his busing efforts, officials are communicating less with the city.
“While before we may have received a few hours’ notice that buses were coming through back channels and different organizations — even including information on the manifest numbers of how many people were going to be on those buses,” Joseph said. “This change means that we no longer get even a scant heads-up. Without this information, it makes it increasingly difficult for us to calculate on a day-to-day basis what our capacity is, and our ability to respond is even more challenged.”
In late September, the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, issued an emergency declaration due to an increase of migrants crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico.
“Additional buses deployed to Eagle Pass are loading up to send migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities. Texas will utilize every strategy to help our border towns and respond to Biden’s border crisis,” Gov. Abbott posted on X in September.
But Joseph said that while the number of buses being sent from Texas is easier to count, city officials don’t always know how migrants are getting to the intake center at the Roosevelt Hotel.
As of Oct. 1, city shelters were caring for over 116,700 people, including over 63,000 asylum-seekers.
On Tuesday, the Adams administration announced a new $38 million commitment from New York state to help provide legal services to asylum-seekers.
In September, the Biden administration extended and redesignated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some Venezuelan immigrants who have arrived in the United States before July 31. The administration estimates nearly half a million migrants would be eligible for the temporary relief from deportation and work authorization.
The Adams administration plans to use some of the funding to help asylum-seekers apply for TPS.
News of the latest spike of migrant arrivals in the city came on the same day Adams embarked on a multi-day trip to Central and South America to visit some of the areas that migrants are traveling through on the way to the United States.
“We have said it from the beginning, but it bears repeating, this is a global humanitarian crisis and once it hits the United States, it’s a national crisis that requires a national response,” Williams-Isom said. “I’m not sure that this administration can say it any clearer.”
